Customer Reviews

At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land

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An extraordinary book. Yossi Klein Halevy is a deeply religious American-born Jewish journalist and Israeli citizen who has lived in Israel for almost twenty years. This book is written as a personal spiritual journey, in which Halevy attempts to experience and understand Islam and Christianity by joining in their rituals of worship. Despite the personal nature of the subject, his historical, political and social commentary are invaluable for those who wish to understand the Middle East conflict today. In a world where hatred is running rampant, he sends a message that solutions can only come through understanding, not violence.

This is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read. It really has two subjects : the political situation in the Holy Land of course, but also the difficulties and the promises of religious dialogue.

I particularly appreciated the fact that Mr. Klein Halevi reached out to Christians and Muslims without reneging or compromising his own faith. That kind of dialogue would, I think, ultimately be meaningless.

I agree with Mr Klein Halevi that real religious dialogue is the royal path to peace, not only in the Holy Land, but also in many other places. I fear, however, that very few people are capable of mustering the necessary strenght, courage, honesty and humility.

One of the things I particularly liked about Mr Klein Halevi is his intellectual honesty, both with his interlocutors and with himself. Moreover, he is not interested in easy victories. Much to his credit, he writes how uneasy he feels when certain Muslims or Christians reach out to him by pointing out their common ground and ... how different they both are from the third party !

As a Roman Catholic, one of Mr Halevi Klein's remarks that most struck me is how the passages of the Gospel which can appear quite antisemitic seem to echo Israel's (verbally) violent public debate. One of course knows these things, but it is useful to be reminded that the unkind remarks the Evangelists occasionally make about the Jews or the Pharisees are actually made in the context of an internal Jewish debate.

The only weakness of Mr Klein Halevi's book is that his Christian contacts were not Palestinians, but Ethiopians, Armenians and Europeans.

I have to admit, moreover, that I sometimes felt a bit uneasy reading about the syncretic, judaizing liturgy of the Beatitudes, a Catholic order about which Mr Klein Halevi writes. Do we really have to resemble each other to respect each other ? Will we feel disappointed if Jews and Muslims do not answer these efforts by adopting at least part of our ways ? Or is this an act of atonement for the former antijudaism of the Church ? I don't understand it. In my eyes, it is one thing to adapt your behavior to pray with people of another faith, but quite another thing to adopt their ways of worship when not in their company. Does it even make sense from a Jewish perspective ? If I'm not mistaken, gentiles do not have to respect Jewish law and are even prohibited from doing so in some cases, which include the observance of the Shabbath. They should respect the seven laws of Noach, which do not include rituals.

I am also unconvinced for political reasons. Palestinian Christians often feel we betrayed them. Whether one agrees or not does not really matter, we should not brush their feelings aside. Jews might think this is yet another attempt to evangelize them, this time by stealth, as the Church has often done in the past (not with the Jews though). Does this encourage dialogue between Israeli Jews and the Church's own flock, Palestinian Christians ? I don't know. I think we should rather follow Mr Klein Halevi's example.

I just finished reading At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden by Yossi Klein Halevi. I couldn't put it down. In his search for Muslims and Christians who would let him share in their spiritual lives, Halevi tries to find a way to connect with his erstwhile enemies outside of politics. He takes us along on his journey and what an astounding array of people we meet: Sufi sheikhs and French nuns and Armenian monks.

And most of all, we get to know Halevi, an American-born Israeli, sensitive and conflicted , who wants to participate in the rebirth of the Jewish people in its own land without harming other peoples, and understanding the tragedy that these two desires are in conflict.

It's a sad book because it ends with the resumption of armed conflict that began in 2000. But it's also a hopeful book because of all of the people Halevi meets who are willing to clasp hands across the divide. In one beautiful scene, Halevi attends a Moslem Sufi zikr, a session of mystical dancing which allows the participants to connect with each other and with God. Despite initial hostility, the experience brings home Halevy and his hosts together in mutual understanding and respect. It's a scrap of hope we can all use in these difficult times.

Very few of us combine hard-headed political analysis with deep spiritual sensitivity. Yossi Klein Halevy, a contributing editor at the New Republic Magazine and at the Jerusalem Report, is a leading political commentator on Israel and the Middle East. In this book we see a different side of the man. Halevy is a man of exquisite religious sensitivity and deep humanity. He practices a kind of truly respectful inter-religious dialogue that is all to hard to find in our day. Whether engaged in discussion with nuns or meditation with Muslim mystics, Halevy never condescends, never juvenalizes and never fails to pay his interlocutors the supreme compliment of examining their religious beliefs with an empathic but discerning eye.

In our post September 11th world, we need the kind of wisdom that Halevy shares so generously.

Read this book.

Rabbi Edward Rettig

This is a deeply thought-provoking book. I ordered it because I have personally been involved in Jewish-Muslim-Christian dialogues (trialogues?) in the USA, and I resonated with the reviews I had read. What surprised (and saddened) me was the extreme difficulty that Yossi had in even finding people willing to dialogue in the Middle East. I had been told that Israel was a segregated society (not officially, but socially) but I did not realize how deeply the mistrust runs. Villages and monasteries that are within visual sight of each other might as well be on different planets.
To cross the cultural divide can literally mean taking your life inot your hands.

Author Yossi Klein takes that risk. With the help of various unconventional guides, he meets with Sufi shaykhs, Armenian priests, Catholic nuns and many others, hoping to communicate on the level of the soul rather than politics. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes not. On so many occasions, history intrudes with its memories of past brutalities -- Crusades, Inquisitions, the Holocaust. This is not a sugar-coated utopian view of peace, but a scathingly honest chronicle of one seeker's search for common ground in a troubled land. With each new encounter, Yossi struggles with his own anger, distrust, and fear -- as did I when I read the book. Definitely a must-read for everyone who is or wants to be involved in interfaith dialogue.

Legend says that the entrance to the Garden of Eden was located at the Machpelah, the Hebron (el Khalil) burial site of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah; the pilgrimage site of Jews and Moslems; the mosque and makeshift synagogue; the "doubling" oneness site that encompasses several conflicting faiths. It is here that Palestinian Peugeots and Jewish Mitsubishis could meet. It is here that the author embarks on a journey into opening one's heart. The author is known for his book, "Confessions of a Jewish Extremist", and for being the subject of the 1985 award winning documentary "KADDISH". An American-born Israeli Jew, raised by a survivor in isolationist Brooklyn, he is a contributor to the NYT Op-Ed page, The Jerusalem Report, and TNR. He didn't support occupation, nor did he support the crumbling Oslo Plan. He did not want to be an self-confident oppressor or a fool. What was he to do? Meditation and prayer? Maybe meeting his fellow spiritual seekers among Israel's 800,000 Moslems and 200,000 Christians would succeed in finding a new path to peace. Beginning in early 1998, at the cusp of the Millennium, Yossi spent two years in dialogue with other spiritual seekers; most were sadly on the fringe, some might even be seen as delusional (but it is a start). Those two years allowed for experiences that cannot be repeated today without potential calamity. Yossi expanded his sacred time to include their holiday celebrations. Could faith, which in Israel is a force of division and conflict, be a source of healing? Could the religions that had conflicting claims on the land be viewed as reinforcements of the area's holiness? Halevi, who did not know the difference between the Assumption and the Annunciation, between Id el-Fitr and Id ed-Adha, who knew more about Buddhism than his sister faiths, met with Sufis, Monks, Nuns, Imams, and Sheiks in mosques, monasteries, grottos and cloisters. There was a little skepticism, and some commonality; there was resentment, there is honesty. In Part 1, Ramadan and Id Eil-Adha, the author, residing in French Hill, tries to incorporate the muezzin's call to prayer from neighboring Anata into his daily devotional prayers. Can the minaret be a lighthouse in the rocky seas of the West Bank, or is it a megaphone of hate? He seeks out Sheikhs, Sufis and other Moslems; some center on death, others on love and life. He explores whether people can focus on the unifying messages of the religions rather than debating the conflicting details. In Part 2, Lent, Easter, and Christmas, Yossi seeks out nuns, monks, Christians and Catholics, Armenians and Ethiopians. Can he learn silence, can they learn not to convert this "perfidious" person, can they no longer judge each other by their people's worst traits? In Part 3, Feast of the Transfiguration and Lailat al-Miraj, and the Epilogue, Yossi confronts and struggles with his worst anxieties, doubts and fears.

This is the story of a Jew who tries to discover if religion can be a source of unity in the Holy Land. He thus begins a two-year exploration of Christianity and Islam. He befriends Christian and Muslim mystics, joins them in prayer in monasteries and mosques searching for wisdom and for peace.

And he succeeds. That is the heartbreak and the triumph of this book. Yossi Halevi succeeds until "the madness comes;" until, as his brother Sheykh Ibrahim is forced into anonymity by the Palestinian Authrity.

Yossi Klein Halevi succeeded but, as Sheykh Ibrahim tells him (in English; using Hebrew is too dangerous for a man whom Arafat warned not to fraternize with Jews) "This is the time of the fanatics... I am crying every night."

Let us all cry.

It is probably the most spiritual Book I have ever read. It turns out that it is not a "Search for God", but for humanity. All the actors playing the same roles, with the same questions and hopes, just different costumes.We are all Christian and Jew and Muslim at the same time.
Mr. Klein Halevi, takes us with him looking for ways to interconect (through their rituals), the three faiths. Instead we discover that this is only possible if we accept that it is the same God we are all praying to.
It is a book full of hope, a cure for the insanity of religious Chauvinism.

I just love this guy. Starting with a simple urge to connect with his neighbors, Yossi Halevi embarks on an awkward, fascinating, dangerous journey through Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. He discovers a series of surprising characters who dream, not just of peace between Jews, Muslims and Christians, but of spiritual friendship. And the story of these fragile, budding friendships becomes an adventure of almost overwhelming power.

I want to quote from one episode, where Halevi and a madcap Jew called Eliyahu Charanamrit McLean attend a mosque in Karawa village on the West Bank:

"This mosque was a family project: Everyone here belonged to the Abu-Laben clan. They were working class people; the shaykh himself was a car mechanic.

"What do the other Muslims think of you?" Eliyahu asked.

"That we're crazy," replied Saud's father. "They think we chant the name of 'Abdallah' instead of 'Allah"". Laughter.

I asked Saud what he experienced during the zakir [or dance of remembering God]. "That our hearts kept getting closer and closer to God," he said, with the Sufi vagueness I'd so often encountered from Ibrahim. ...

Ibrahim, not to be poetically outdone, added "Our souls went up to heaven like clouds".

"When you pray together," said the shaykh's father, "you form one heart".

I felt sad for this forlorn Sufi Shteibl. Here was an Islam with which we could make peace, yet it was almost absurdly perepheral. Still, maybe the fact that a handful of Muslims and Jews had danced together was enough for God to work with; perhaps He would magnify our prayers, widen the circle of ecstasy." (p. 104-105)

Halevi is realist enough to claim no easy victories. As the level of sectarian violence rises again, his network of friends retains little but hope and prayer. It's a marvelous book.

-author of Correcting Jesus

One problem with writing intelligent books on religion is that religion demands the author experience it. Halevi takes this difficult challenge and seeks common ground with Christians and Muslims. To find this common ground he is willing to push his boundaries, go beyond his fears to find a common ground.

In his efforts he encounters a Catholic order of religious that seeks to return to the Jewish roots of Jesus as a common ground for Jewish-Christian relations; a Catholic monk of the Melkite rite (Jerusalem rite) seeing Arab-Jewish understanding through the Arab Christian; a common ground of genocide with Armenian Christians; a common ground of love with Sufi sheiks ...

Throughout his search runs a thread of the common monotheistic underpinnings of the three major religions of Israel. A second thread is a more universal acceptance that includes the great Eastern traditions - Buddhism and Hinduism. The third thread is the history of the Jewish people and the reality of strife in Israel. Through these threads, Halevi challenges the reader to confront his or her prejudices in the political and religious arenas.

The net result is not a great book, but one I highly recommend because of the issues raised and the author's personal willingness to share his experience in addressing the issues.